Why Women Seek Employment
SOCIOLOGISTS cite several reasons why women seek employment outside the home. In particular, the modern woman simply has less to do in the home than her great-grandmother did. With longer life-spans, fewer children, more laborsaving devices and new convenience foods, a modern woman can find herself at age thirty-five with the youngest child in school and wondering how to fill the hours of a day.
For many women, working outside the home after the children are all in school or are grown has become a solution. As a result, by 1962 the average age of workingwomen in the U.S. was forty-one, as compared with twenty-six in 1900 and thirty-seven in 1950.
The mushrooming divorce rate—in the U.S. alone over a million women divorce annually—also pushes women into the job market. Often they must work to live. A recent study showed that court-ordered child-support payments, even when they are faithfully paid, typically are less than half the cost of rearing the children involved. This helps to explain why divorced and separated women now make up nearly two out of three women in the labor force.
Furthermore, as they see friends, neighbors and even parents divorcing, many modern women wonder whether it is not more prudent to plan on the possibility that they, too, may, later in life, have to support themselves. Is it realistic, women may ask, to count on a man for a lifetime of support? So working throughout marriage is seen by a woman as a form of insurance against finding herself, at forty, divorced and with children to support, and no job skills or work history on which to lean.
Another reason that many married women seek employment is to supplement their husband’s paycheck. With the high rate of inflation, some families need the extra money for necessities. Others simply want to purchase luxuries that the family could not otherwise afford, or to raise the standard of living to a level that the husband alone could not maintain.
If the husband’s work is seasonal or subject to periodic layoffs, income from a wife’s job can provide a stabilizing economic support, tiding the family over difficult times. Especially is this true since most women work in service professions, which are less likely to be quickly hard hit by unemployment than traditionally male-dominated fields such as construction and manufacturing.
A Dominant Influence
While the above factors have contributed to many women getting employment, the women’s liberation movement is apparently largely responsible for this trend. Concepts brought to the fore by the movement have caused many women, even those having no direct ties with it, to express a dissatisfaction with homemaking and to seek personal identity and independence. They desire to be involved in a world beyond their own family.
To some women, marriage itself seems on the way out, as no longer being a viable institution in the modern world with its new morality. Also, growing numbers of women are repudiating their traditional role—that of nurturing the young. The U.S. birth rate is at an all-time low, down from 3.7 children for each family in 1957 to 1.8 in 1975, with the trend continuing to slide dramatically in 1976.
While in the 1950’s mothers had a tendency to stay at home with newborn and preschool children before entering the job force, many of today’s women don’t want to wait. The life of a housewife and mother, with its degree of isolation and emphasis on service to others, seems to many women today outmoded, boring and limiting.
“After my first daughter was born, I felt that I had given birth to her and that I had died myself,” says one young mother of two, a college graduate who was accustomed to working. “It was the end of me as an independent person with ties to the outside world.”
This woman found the adjustment to being a full-time housewife and mother depressing. “I decided to go back to work after I found myself buying ladies’ magazines with articles on things to make to save money,” she said. “I realized that I could make more money holding a job.” So leaving her two young daughters, one only a few months old, in the care of a housekeeper, she returned to work.
The view that a housewife is the “lowest of the low” as far as status is concerned has caused many women to seek employment. “If you stay home, people think it’s because you’re too dumb to hold a job,” one young woman explains. More husbands, too, are urging their wives to get a job. One encouraged his reluctant wife to return to work shortly after the birth of their first child. Why?
“Partly selfish on my part,” he says. “I don’t like coming home and hearing that the price of carrots has doubled.” He is afraid that eventually his wife will bore him if she stays in the home. “I think of her mother,” he explains. “She started out an intelligent woman but now I can’t remember her ever saying anything vaguely interesting. She’s never done anything except keep house, and the result is that her mind is now stultified. I don’t want my wife to be like that. Most of the things my wife does for the baby are strictly mechanical—like cooking food and mashing it up, and so forth. You can take some pride in a job well done, but I don’t think that’s much fun or very interesting.”
A comparison of two surveys shows the effect of such attitudes toward the traditional role of women. In the survey taken in the 1960’s, before the women’s movement had such an impact on the average woman, 72 percent of the women polled said that they really liked their work as homemakers. Most of them even enjoyed, or said they didn’t mind, work defined as drudgery, like cleaning the house. But in a recent survey, only about half the women polled said that housework provided them even “occasional pleasure.”
But how do married women and mothers feel who take on the responsibilities of holding a job and caring for a home? Does this bring them satisfaction and happiness?